, the president is meeting withjohnboehner, thefirst face-to-face talk. in december 2010, you called your plan the moment of truth. almost two years later, but moment are we at now? >> i think this is the magic moment. a moment when our generation has the chance to really do something about this problem that we created. it is our generation that got us into this mess. i think we have a good chance. yet a second term democrats president who has come out and said he is willing to put entitlements on the table. big deal. you have a speaker, a republican speaker who really gets it. he understands the deaths of the problems they face. he has said the are going to put revenues on the table. big move. we got half the members of the senate already saying they will support a balanced plan. which makes a lot of sense. we have the business community lined up firmly for doing something. most importantly, we have the fiscal cliff. where if we go over it, we are going to face the most predictable economic crisis in history. for all of us in here, it is also the most avoidable. i think this is the magic mome

a tax increase. ifspeakerboehnersaysi'll go along with that, that's where we'll start. i think e converti is under way for a solution. >> ifill: senator durban, are you kicking the can down the road by only talking about the tax ruts and not talking about the spending cuts as well? >> let me tell you something, i was on the bowles simpson commission, i voted for it, bipartisan commission that included spending cuts as well as revenue increases. i know that to reach four or five trillion dollars in deficit reduction you need to put everything on the table. not just taxes for the wealthy. that's an important piece of it, but it isn't all of it. you ed much mor >> the president said today in his news conference that he was very familiar with the literature on the overreach of presidents in their second term or their potential for overreach. do you think that's a possibility here? do you see that? we have heard, for instance, republicans say, hey, we can talk about immigration now. is it possible that some things actually are in reach? >> oh, i do think -- i think immigration reform